Jaded Empire

The game is, at its heart, Knights of the Old Republic only with Kung-fu
masters and asskicking instead of Jedis and lightsabers. This is not a
criticism. It’s what every single person who buys the game is looking for. The
summary is that Bioware has delivered exactly what everyone wanted, and I’m
enjoying the game a lot.

On closer examination, the game improves on KOTOR in some ways but also
(unsurprisingly) fails in some of the same places. Let’s take a look.

As regular readers may remember, I wagered psu a case of
beer that Jade Empire would use the same D20
engine, internally, as did KOTOR. I am lucky that psu doesn’t actually drink
beer, because I am willing to concede that I was wrong.

There’s a lot here that feels like D20. There are still “stats” representing
your overall power level, but they are far enough removed from D20 that they
were clearly developed in-house. The combat system is completely new. Co-
author psu referred to it as “Soul Calibur-like” but it’s not as polished as
that. Really, what you have here is a game that plays like an RPG but then,
every so often, makes you play a round of Street Fighter.

Your character’s stats (of course) determine his or her studliness in combat,
as measured in three ways. Body feeds directly into the amount of damage you
can take before keeling over and dying. Spirit determines the amount of
chi you have. Chi can be used to heal yourself, to power magical spells,
or to enhance physical attacks. Mind determines the amount of “focus” you
have. Focus is used for attacks with weapons and also allows you to enter
“focus mode” which slows the world down to a crawl, a la The Matrix (or as
in the game Max Payne).

Instead of feats or skills, your character learns different fighting
techniques over time and can power them up in different ways. There are bare-
handed martial-arts techniques (effective against most enemies, including the
undead), weapon techniques, magical techniques, and “support” techniques which
don’t deal direct damage, but instead cause special effects (such as slowing
the enemy down, or draining their chi). Different techniques are more
effective against different enemies, for different reasons. Learning to switch
between them in the middle of combat is the key to success.

One way in which Knights of the Old Republic improved upon its Dungeons and
Dragons predecessors was its unashamed elimination of drudgery. Inventory
management? Gone! Carry as much as you like. Stat management? Click this magic
button and the game will manage it for you. Save points? Surely you jest. Save
every 30 seconds, if you like! (And I do).

Jade Empire brutally cuts the nonessential aspects of play even closer to
the bone. Inventory management is reduced by getting rid of nearly every type
of carryable item except weapons and “essence gems.” You have character
statistics, but the rock-scissors-paper nature of combat will require you to
abandon subtle strategy and enhance them all at roughly the same rate. Your
companions presumably have inventories and statistics as well, but you don’t
get to see them: the game manages them for you.

What I’m enjoying the most is the plot. It has its cliche elements, but not to
the level of being offensive. It follows the by-now-nearly-an-immutable-law-
of-nature Bioware pattern: constrained sandbox beginning, wide-open “second
chapter,” and a more tightly scripted endgame portion. It turns out that your
character – and I bet you didn’t see this coming! – has a Mysterious Origin
and a Very Important Destiny to fulfill.

You also get to decide whether you want to be good or evil. Oh, excuse me, I
mean, if you want to “follow the Way of the Open Palm” or “be a disciple of
the Way of the Closed Fist.” This is one of only two areas in which the game
disappoints. I understand the desire to provide an incentive to replay the
game, but the implementation is clumsy; it shows me that the game designers
were students of the Way of the Ham Fist. To be clear, I’m not complaining
that the game offers the player the choice of being an insufferable puritan or
a vile blackguard, I just wish they hadn’t tried to formalize its effect on
gameplay. It feels like they just wanted to reuse as much of the KOTOR
design as possible, and in this one area I think that was a mistake.

The other (small) problem with Jade Empire is that, like its predecessor,
it has terrible, terrible puzzles. As long as
the game stays in its “find this person, and kick his ass” mode, it’s fine.
Occasionally, though, it tries to give you a puzzle to solve, and the puzzles
are insultingly bad and trivial. The reasons for this are fairly obvious:
Jade Empire is a mass-market game, and they are afraid that if they make the
puzzles interesting “too hard” they will alienate a large
number of players. This is a dumb attitude. Providing alternative routes
around tough puzzles is one thing, but dumbing them down is just hurtful to
everyone involved. If you really think that puzzles are going to ruin the game
for your players, then there’s an obvious solution: don’t include any.
Throwing in a few lame clunkers that can be solved through brute force just
wastes everyone’s time.

Since most of the puzzles are on optional quests anyway, this doesn’t ruin
what is an otherwise enjoyable game. It just tarnishes it a little.

Those complaints aside, I do want to reiterate that I’m having fun playing the
game. I think you shouldn’t believe the hype being heaped upon the game by,
well, just about everyone. This is not a perfect game, by any stretch of the
imagination, and the 9.8, 9.9 ratings being showered upon it by the gaming
press simply demonstrate how meaningless such numbers are. Jade Empire is
not a perfect game, nor an innovative game, nor a future classic. What it is,
however, is a superbly balanced game. It is a game that most of its
purchasers will play through to completion, and will provide a satisfying
experience. I’m not trying to damn it with faint praise. Given how terrible
most games (and specifically most RPGs) are, this is quite an accomplishment.

The cost of all this superb balance is that the game lacks daring. In places
where the game’s designers had opportunities to make something strong and
sharp (such as the aforementioned puzzles), they instead intentionally made
something soft and dull. I understand the tradeoff. Had I been producing the
game, I might have made the same choice. But I can still feel some regret for
the shadow the nonexistent, sharper game casts over the one I actually own.